This object is available for public use. Individuals interested in reproducing this object in a publication, web site or for any commercial purpose must first receive written permission from the Brown University Library.

Now almost forgotten, Distributism was a composite of several
social and moral theories first articulated by Gilbert Keith
Chesterton (1874-1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953) in the pages of
volume 2 of The New Age. The
initial concepts arose from the four-way (and more) argument among
H.G.Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton over modernity
that began with Belloc's “Thoughts on Modern
Thought” (02:108). Although probably initially
stage-managed by Orage, the debate became a messy, two-year-long
wrangle that engaged many readers until the discussion petered out in
1909.

That discussion, now known as “the
Chesterbelloc” contoversy, helped Belloc and Chesterton
develop a rationale for equitable distribution of property and
restoration of worker control in commerce, agriculture, and
industry. This cluster of ideas, soon called
“Distributism,” was based on the two men's look
back, to European history, as well as their concerns about the present
and the future of mass industrial society. Their ideas were not
especially daring or innovative, but rather were built on what they
felt had worked in the past. Calling for a return to the Christian
social conscience, Distributism warned against the trend toward
dehumanizing state control of society and for the efficacy of the
self-contained organic community.

This restoration of society to a human, organic scale was to be
accomplished through a return to a social system not unlike medieval
guilds — small units organized according to natural economic classes
and productive functions. The idea was to create a balanced or mixed
economy of independent farmers and small industries owned and operated
by the workers themselves, thus creating a sort of peasant-worker
state. The Roman Catholic Church was to provide whatever federal and
international control might be needed. Independent, small farming was
to be the backbone of this society based on decentralized control,
self-sufficiency, and rural reconstruction.

This new/old society was definitely not to be
imperialist. Things were to be decided by the people in small groups,
negotiated by personal interaction. Anarchism's belief in no coercion
of cooperation was a major tenet, and the Distributist ideal was not
far from that described by Kropotkin. Distributism was anti-Utopian
and did not offer a blueprint, as would have H. G. Wells or the
Fabians, gladly, for a future society. Belloc and Chesterton refused
to be tied down to specific proposals, believing that any social
outcome needed to come from individual human desire and conditions,
rather than from planning imposed from above.

Distributism claimed to be much more than a political theory; it
was a philosophy or way of life firmly founded on religious
principles. Belloc, born in France, was a life-long Roman Catholic and
Chesterton became one in 1922. Chesterton in particular sought to
retrieve the sanctity of human relationships through articulating a
form of Thomism that sought to reintegrate the individual into a
corporate state. The key to this was the family and private property
— but not too much property.

Distributism critiqued both socialism and capitalism. Capitalism
was called a denial of property because capitalism denied its
limits. Communism was termed the unnatural child of this mother,
capitalism, and was predicted to eventually consume its parent. It has
been called the forerunner of the “Third Way”
approach now being touted as the ideal mixed economy for the 21st
century. Some thinkers argue that the Chesterbelloc's critique of
collectivism has more credence for post-industrial rather than
industrial society.

Initial Distributist ideas were touted by Cecil Chesterton,
W.R. Titterton, and G.K. Chesterton in the Everyman. Other early proponents of
Distributist thought were A. R. Orage, A. J. Penty, S. G. Hobson,
Maurice Reckitt, Father Vincent McNabb, Commander Herbert Shove, Eric
Gill, Sir Henry Slesser, and Ada Jones Chesterton. Their ideas were
often anti-imperial, anti-elite, anti-Utopian, and anti-machine (at
least for some Distributists; not all). Distributionists were for
balance — in the distribution of property (the basis of wealth, they
believed), in family life, and in the human scale of
organizations. Distributism was not very compatible with the women's
suffrage movement of the time, perhaps because it failed to explore
adequately the role of women in the much-lauded family
unit. Chesterton attempted in his works to give credit and honor to
women's domestic labor, but perhaps that did not solve the financial
problems of poor families already “divorced” from
the land.

Distributist theory contributed heavily to Orage's enthusiasm for
guild socialism in The New Age
from 1911-1919. Belloc's book, The Servile
State (1912), was an important force behind this
enthusiasm, along with his An Essay on the
Restoration of Property (1936). S.G. Hobson promoted
guild socialism in an unsigned series in The
New Age, as a synthesis of political socialism and
industrial syndicalism. But Distributism drew upon a range of
attitudes and ideas, including Chartism, Burkean organicism, French
revolutionary thought, socialism, anarchism, populism, and
liberalism. As James Corrin wrote, the social philosophy of Chesterton
and Belloc “was a peculiar hybrid of both radical and conservative ideas”(Corrin,
208).

Just one of those ideas was the back-to-the-land movement, of which
Distributism was the major impetus. This resulted in the Catholic
Rural Life Movement of America, the Antigonish movement in Canada, the
Southern Agrarian movement in the U.S. South (which affected Franklin
D. Roosevelt's planning of the New Deal), and the Rural Reconstruction
Association as well as other land reform movements in England.

In 1911 Cecil Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc founded the
Eye-Witness as a vehicle for
their ideas. Renamed the New
Witness in 1912 and edited by Cecil Chesterton, this
paper exposed the Marconi scandal in 1912 and got Cecil a conviction
for libel. G. K. Chesterton took over its editorship in 1916 when
Cecil went to World War I, and continued it after Cecil's death, until
1923. In 1925 the paper was reconstituted as G. K.'s Weekly, to be a platform for his
Distributist ideas.

In 1926, the Distributist League was founded, mainly in order to
help the G. K. Weekly's
finances (Sewell, 141). The Distributist League had two objectives:

preservation of property, in order that the liberty of the individual and
family could be independent of oppressive systems,

and better distribution of capital by individual ownership of the means
and instruments of production, which was the only way to preserve private
property (Corrin 108-9).

But its real goal, admitted Chesterton, was propaganda. By 1928,
the League had something over 2,000 members — its peak of
membership. The first large-scale Distributist public meeting was a
Bernard Shaw-Chesterton debate chaired by Belloc, held in Kingsway
Hall that year and broadcast live by the British Broadcasting
Corporation. It resulted in a near-riot (Sewell 141).

Hilaire Belloc himself articulated a major criticism of
Distributism in 1929. According to Duff Cooper's autobiography, the
morning after an evening's campaigning on Cooper's behalf, Hilare
Belloc:

[...] was sitting in the club next morning over a glass of beer
when an enthusiastic young man was shown in who wanted the honour of a
word with him. The young man explained that he was a fervent supporter
of the principle of distributism, the political theory for which
Chesterton and Belloc were supposed to stand and which advocated the
small ownership of the national wealth. Belloc said he was glad to be
assured of the young man's support, and added that so far as he could
see there was only one difficulty in the way of his policy being
adopted.

“What is that?” eagerly asked the young man, anxious to learn.

“It is,” answered Belloc, “like trying to force the water at
Niagara to go up instead of coming down.” The young man went away sorrowful. (Cooper 166)

Over time, the Distributist League took up a number of issues and
positions. In 1930, it withdrew its support of the trade union
movement and turned, shortly thereafter, to monarchism. In 1931, the
Distributist League began publishing its own newsletter, The Distributionist, as G. K.'s Weekly could no longer keep up with
the heavy editorial traffic. As Distributism looked to the past for a
model of a simpler, kinder, gentler world, it began to focus on what
it saw as the abuses of international finance in causing wars, famine,
and disruption in social relations. Steeped in European cultural and
religious attitudes as they were, it was not a big step for some
Distributists to believe in a conspiracy of international Jewish
finance responsible for the social chaos caused by both capitalism and
socialism. Chesterton, Belloc, Eliot and Ezra Pound were among those
who succumbed to this viewpoint at various times.

By August 1935, Chesterton wrote that, as things now stood, he
personally was willing to look into fascism because parliamentary
government seemed to have failed the common man. Especially after
Chesterton's death in 1936, the Distributist movement seemed to spin
out of control. That year, Belloc took over as editor of the successor
magazine, the Weekly Review, and
the journal and organization declared themselves more sanguine about
dictatorship as an expedient against international communism.

Also in 1936, Belloc became president of the League, with
T. S. Eliot, Eric Gill, and Ada Jones Chesterton as vice
presidents. Without Chesterton as a calming influence, the
organization began to drift toward the ideas of the British Union of
Fascists, in response to what it saw as a threat of worldwide
communism. This monomania drove away many initial supporters. Perhaps
the last break with its early origins came when the Weekly Review advocated British
imperialism. At the outbreak of World War II, 1940, the Distributist
League was disbanded. A new organization was formed in March 1947, but
it lasted only a few years. Finally it was apparent that the
20th-century's move toward large organizations and mass culture was
inexorable.

Wilfred Sheed has written that, regardless of any embarrassment
they may have brought to the Catholic community, “there can be little doubt that Chesterton, Belloc, and the
Distributist circle shattered the intellectual inferiority complex of
British Catholics” (Corrin 171).

Distributism constituted a revolutionary response to the conformity
of the modern industrial age by its critique of a
collectivist-plutocratic state. The mainspring of the neo-Thomist
revival in Catholic intellectual circles, it profoundly affected a
generation of Roman Catholic writers in England as well as many North
American thinkers: Dorothy Day, Robert Coles, and Marshall McLuhan,
among others. In her 1943 biography of Chesterton, Maisie Ward lists
movements in the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa,
and Sri Lanka that were directly inspired by Distributism.